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>> Cate Campbell & Emma McKeon
Golden Days Return With a Headline Performance From Australia’s Dolphins BY IAN HANSON
The glory days of the Australian Swim Team returned in spectacular style in a memorable eight-day Olympic gold medal rush at the Tokyo Aquatic Centre – and already team bosses are planning and plotting the team’s assault towards Paris 2024. The nine-gold medal haul by the Dolphins have generated these page one headlines including “Our Greatest” that have sent Australia into a swimming spin. The team proudly displayed their medals and Australian flags and posed for history-making, history-keeping photos today in Tokyo after a medal factory-revealing final press conference, before returning to Australia and a two-week quarantine in Darwin. A team of all ages from 28 and 29-year-old veterans of four Olympic campaigns Emily Seebohm and Cate Campbell to baby of the team in 17-year-old schoolgirl Mollie O’Callaghan, who returns with three medals – two gold and a bronze. A team that came together like the teams of 2000, 2004 and 2008 – teams that included the likes of Kieren Perkins, Susie O’Neill, Ian Thorpe, Grant Hackett, Jodie Henry and Petria 22
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SWIMMINGWORLD.COM
Thomas. Thorpe saying in television commentary this week on Channel 7 that the spirit and the success of the class of 202021 matched that of the glory days of 2000-01 – when they won the World Championships in Fukuoka. It has been 20 years since the Dolphins commanded the kind of headlines that heralded the performances gracing the front and back pages of the newspapers in this swimming mad country. With Olympic broadcaster Channel Seven bringing unprecedented blanket coverage that has generating record ratings with much of Australia forced to stay at home in Covid lockdown – watching every lap, every turn and every dive of swimming coverage – making a splash after a broadcast drought that saw no live free-to-air coverage of the 2019 World Championships. The Swim Team is back! A 35-strong pool of Dolphins, led by National Head Coach Rohan Taylor and his right hand man, mentor coach Leigh Nugent, and a team of coaches who steered their charges to
